Dinosaur Craft and Pretend Play

Dinosaurs and pretend play are two of the favorite things to play in this house.  This craft was such a fun combination of the two and we had an absolute blast creating these dinos…And playing with them!

This dinosaur craft kit is such a fun craft.  We loved seeing this come in the mail. The excitement in our house was pretty high when this package came!

Dinosaur Craft

Everything sent in the kit was high quality…from the solid wood dinosaurs to the thick and brightly colored paint, I was very impressed with this craft kit!  The whole kit came packaged up in a super cute burlap bag and once untied, we were ready to get crafting!
We had my three kids here and Little Niece and Nephew.  They were all so excited that they got to paint their own dinosaurs. 
We went with a child-led painting process here.  And together thought that since we really don’t know what color dinosaurs reeeeeallly were, why not make them however we wanted??
Our dinosaurs turned out to be a pretty mix of colors!
This craft kit is such a great quality that it would be a great piece to add to a nursery as shelf decoration.  We used our dinosaurs in pretend play.  The wooden pieces are very sturdy and are holding up really well to lots of busy hands.
They played on a table together as a family…
…And hung out in a corn sensory bin too. 
We even took these guys outside to play in the leaves.  We’ve been using our dinosaurs in pretend play almost every day since the paint dried!

Fine Motor Pincer Grasp Color Match

This fine motor pincer grasp activity uses colored beads to work on fine motor skills while kids color match beads to play dough. When threading beads onto dry pasta (or skewers, toothpicks, or other “sticks”) stuck into play dough, children improve various skills necessary for pencil grasp and functional grasp.  Use this simple fine motor activity to improve visual motor skills, pincer grasp, in-hand manipulation, separation of the sides of the hand, and more.
This was a fun play time activity for the little ones in our house.  We had fun with fine motor play while working on colors, matching, and fine motor skills.


use play dough and beads to help kids with color matching while addressing fine motor skills like pincer grasp, in-hand manipulation, separation of the sides of the hand and other visual motor skills.

Fine Motor Pincer Grasp Color Match Activity

Play dough is such a great learning tool.  The kids always love when play dough is pulled out.  This one took two colors and some spaghetti noodles.  We’ve seen lots of examples of this type of activity around the web, and love the inspiration from Mess For Less.  Instead of stacking cereal on our spaghetti noodles, we went with colored beads and two colors of play dough.

I put two colors of play dough on a plastic tray and stuck some dry spaghetti noodles into the dough.  Scatter some beads around and we are ready to play!  I put a few beads onto the same-colored dough to show an example of matching the colors.
Baby Girl and Little Niece and Nephew (both newly 2 years old) LOVED this!  They really astonished me that they could match the colored beads right away to the correct dough.
They really got into this activity.  There were hands everywhere for a while, reaching for beads and noodles!

Pincer Grasp

What made this a great activity for the littlest ones was the pincer grasp that they worked on when picking up the beads.  They had to manipulate the beads within their hand to get the bead onto the thin noodle. 
Pincer grasp is using the thumb and index finger to pick up small items.  This grasp is important for development when children are holding a string to thread in lacing tasks or for managing a button.  These two little ones didn’t care much about how they were holding the bead…They just knew they were having fun 🙂

Color Match with Play Dough

This was such a fun activity for our little ones.  Loads of learning happening here!  Colors, matching, sorting, even patterns for the older ones.  Baby Girl and Little Nephew really got excited about the colors.  They would say “purple!” and “green!” Not necessarily for the correct colors, but it was pretty fun…and cute 🙂

Have you done a version of the noodles in play dough activity?   We’ll be doing this again for sure with all the fun we had!

Looking for more Fine Motor activities?  You might love these: